From my inbox:
Hi. I’m Danny from SamsonBlinded.org. We run the largest Jewish blog and one of the largest Israeli political sites.
As you probably know already, the Foreign Ministry launched a program to promote pro-Israeli opinions on the Internet. In an effort to advance Jewish blogosphere, we will be placing links to about one thousand blogs on our pages. In order to make them more relevant for our readers (and clickable), the links will be integrated in the context.
You’re welcome to visit SamsonBlinded.org/news or /blog and tell me what page you would like to have your link on. Please choose a specific context relevant to your site. This offer is completely free and might bring you a few hundred visitors monthly.
The links target organic traffic with nofollow tag. We had to introduce this restriction (waived for reciprocal links) because a thousand of one-time outbound links might affect our Google rankings.
Who do these guys think they are kidding? For a start, I have not heard of this blog, beyond the various ads I have seen on Ynet and Google, not to mention the various spam comments left on blogs from time to time. So I seriously doubt it is the “largest Jewish blog and one of the largest Israeli political sites.”
But perhaps more irksome than that claim is the nice little scam they have going. Namely sending out the above mail to hundreds of bloggers to get them to visit your site and make it sound like you are doing us all a favor!
Of course, no favor comes for free, and we are reminded that the prized links we would receive will not compromise the Google rankings of our benefactor. But alas, it may be too late, since I cannot seem to locate our friends in the search results for “Jewish blog”, despite their claim of being the largest one.
Update: According to Alexa, Samsonblinded.org has a traffic rank of 443,270. Which places it way behind many Jewish blogs, including this one.
